Blog topic: Stanford Digital Repository

The Big Idea Festival was a big deal to the students enrolled in "Computers and Interfaces: Psychological and Societal Perspectives", an undergraduate course (Communications 169) taught by Cliff Nass in Winter 2013. The event, which took place at Stanford on March 11, was a showcase of projects produced by teams of students with the assignment to imagine and design innovative interactions between automobiles and the people who drive them.

When thinking about how researchers at Stanford might want to use the Stanford Digital Repository to support their work, probably the first scenario we envisioned was for publication support. And apparently we weren't the only ones.

Even before we started advertising the availability of the SDR for research data, Hatef Monajemi, a graduate student in the statistics department, came to us with just the problem we had envisioned.

An.thro.po.cene: /ˈanTHrəpəˌsēn/ noun The current geologic age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. -- Oxford Dictionaries

Great things are going on at the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR), and when great things are going on, word is sure to get around. Earth Sciences PhD student Mike Osborne is the creator and co-producer of Stanford's "Generation Anthropocene" podcast. Mike learned about the SDR's digital preservation services from our colleagues over at HighWire Press and is now working with us to preserve audio and transcripts of the more than 50 "Generation Anthropocene" episodes that have been produced thus far.

In developing the new deposit interface for the Stanford Digital Repository, first and foremost we had in mind the needs of Stanford students, researchers, faculty and the SUL selectors who build collections for their use. So it was a surprising -- and happy -- moment when it became apparent that Stanford library staff have their very own content to archive, too. A collection for gathering SUL staff publications and research has been established for this purpose and is already populated with two exemplars of the leaderful work and innovative ideas produced by our colleagues.

It should come as no surprise that University Archives is brimming with a diverse body of digital content gathered from all corners of Stanford, files documenting student life, campus affairs, and the administration of the University. Since his introduction to SDR Self-Deposit, University Archivist Daniel Hartwig has made frequent use of the system to preserve and provide access to these historic materials. Here are some deposits of particular interest:

Today marks a major milestone in Stanford University LIbraries' ability to provide easy and seamless access to digital collections. As of today, digital collections will begin appearing in SearchWorks, the Libraries' discovery interface. This means that collections can be discovered in the course of searching and browsing through the totality of Stanford's library collection.